Marlborough Chelsea is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition Shall we sit, stand or kneel?, featuring New York artist Hannah Levy and British artist Michael Simpson, conceived by and organized with Wills Baker. Although from different backgrounds and generations, Levy and Simpson each unravel a dark comedy of humanistic confinement in the objects and ergonomics of the cleric.

Michael Simpson’s paintings of leper squints, titled after the small holes in medieval churches (built to allow sufferers of leprosy and other “undesirables” to listen to a sermon without sitting amongst the congregation) point to the authoritarian devices employed by the institution. While Simpson’s paintings directly address the infamy of religious history, he utilizes seemingly flattened compositions which, upon close inspection, reveal an inner surface that works both in pigment and formal line to yield a dynamic and complex display of the act of painting itself.

Hannah Levy’s sculptures use flesh-colored cast silicone and wrought nickel-plated steel to mimic the erotic and industrial. Her bench constructions twist the synthetic into bindings of the metal grid. This vision-like engineering reflects a physicality while providing a ubiquitous domestic form with new agency where a relationship to figuration, death, and debased flesh are emphasized.

In sharing an architectural language with Simpson, Levy’s benches complement his paintings, humanizing and alerting the viewer to their corporeality—something often dismissed or repressed by the instruments of socio-religious institutions. Moving between abstraction and representation, the artists situate their work in a purgatory where links between the spiritual and everyday world are broken down. By transforming and recalibrating—through secularization or sheer perversion—objects with embedded power, meant to elicit obedience or faith, become undermined.